


When the Sun Hits

by Windybird



Series: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots [4]
Category: Cyberpunk 2077 (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Humor, Character Study, Crack Treated Seriously, Depression, Developing Relationship, F/F, F/M, Father-Son Relationship, Friends to Lovers, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Multi, Non-Sexual Intimacy, References to Depression, Slow Burn, Unconventional Relationship, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, V Needs A Hug (Cyberpunk 2077), Worldbuilding, tfw u unwillingly inherit ur parents faults and trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-13 02:15:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29519325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Windybird/pseuds/Windybird
Summary: Jesse's dick may have been huge, but his soul had shrunk. He was spending the best years of his life co-managing Buck-a-Slice, for God’s sake. He never became the rockerboy he wanted to be. And soon enough, Tanya was going to realize that Mr. Stud had only been a temporary fix- that you could slather fresh paint over a decaying wall, but it didn’t stop the asbestos from creeping into the room.˚ ˚ ˚ ˚Flaming Crotch Guy is more than what others say he is. Being V's new input and the son of the long-dead rockerboy trapped inside her head fight for top place on that list.
Relationships: Johnny Silverhand & Flaming Crotch Guy, Johnny Silverhand & V, V & Jackie Welles, V/Flaming Crotch Guy
Series: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2168328
Comments: 4
Kudos: 5





	When the Sun Hits

**Author's Note:**

> okay, first things first- I was NOT aware that Flaming Crotch Guy was voiced and based on an actual YouTuber until I finished a few thousand words of this fic, so for the record, Jesse was made with the understanding that they had to give a name to Flaming Crotch Guy and literally nothing else.
> 
> Secondly- I think this is the wildest fic I've ever written in approximately seven years of writing fanfiction. I never expected that I'd feel so strongly about the hypothetical relationship of Flaming Crotch Guy and V, and yet it has unironically become my favorite ship in the entire fandom. Someone please, please take me out back and shoot me between the eyes like an injured horse. Oh my God.

He never wanted to be known as Flaming Crotch Guy, you know.

His real name’s Jesse. Jesús, if you’re feeling fancy, but nobody ever calls him that ‘cept his mama, and even then it’s only on the bad days. But his friends call him Jesse. At least, they would if he had any friends.

He’s not ashamed to admit that he’s something of a loser. His mama always told him that being called a loser when he was in elementary school- and then middle school, and then high school, and then parts of college- was a compliment of the highest order; it meant that he dared to be different, to stick out from the crowd. He was going to work at a megacorp while his tormentors begged for change in the streets and slowly succumbed to cyberpsychosis. Mama’s eyes would light up as she said this, gripping him so tightly, it left bruises on his skin for days afterwards. She was more excited about it than he was.

If it were up to him, though, he’d leave the megacorp positions to his schoolyard- and university quad- bullies. Sure, the cash from working a year as a ‘Saka agent was probably more than he and Mama would ever see, but cash was fleeting. No, the real worth lied in being remembered long after you were dead. It lied in being a rockerboy, like Johnny Silverhand.

Mama nearly went ballistic when he made the mistake of saying as much, the first time the thought had occurred to him. Her eyes nearly bulged out of her head, and she screamed and screamed and screamed until the neighbors banged on the walls for her to shut up. She locked him outside the apartment for hours afterwards, and he had to go downstairs to eat dinner with Mrs. Dougherty, who secretly owned seven cats despite the Megabuilding’s strict regulations about keeping pets, and who constantly asked about where his father was, and clucked with Catholic disapproval when he told her, for the hundredth time, that it was just him and Mama. His pasta tasted like the stench of cat pee that permeated the air of Mrs. Dougherty’s apartment that night, and he never made the mistake of telling Mama about his plans for the future again.

It didn’t matter, though. A fire had been lit inside him. He didn’t know how to play guitar, and he wasn’t rich enough to buy one, so he stole a rockerboy BD from the school library and figured it out from there. When he was twelve, he’d managed to scrounge up enough from his job as the busboy at Captain Caliente to buy a back-of-the-venue ticket to Tainted Overlord. There, smushed between a screaming, sweaty crowd of twenty-something-year-olds, barely able to see the band past neon heads and skewered hats and the music and roar from the crowd mixing into one undefinable wave of sound, he got so excited he pissed himself. He’d snuck back inside the apartment after the show and scrubbed himself clean in the shower, but forgot to get rid of the incriminating evidence; Mama had asked if he was having night terrors again, and he’d had to lie and say he was, and she forced him to sleep in her bed for a week. He didn’t dare correct her, because she would’ve killed him if she knew he’d snuck out to a concert- a rock concert, especially.

Mama hated most music, but her least favorite was Samurai. She never explained why, and he never prodded her for an explanation. It was simply a fact of life: the sky was blue, grass was green, and Mama couldn’t stand the sound of Johnny Silverhand’s guitar. It was like flashing a red flag at a bull; she’d huff and go on a rampage for the rest of the day, cursing the existence of rockerboys and their god.

So it was lucky, in a way, that he’d never managed to make it as a rockerboy. In hindsight, it felt pretty obvious that he wasn’t going to break out into a field that demanded charisma and sex and natural talent to exude from your very pores, but he’d still been so, so hopeful the first time he auditioned for a band, a few years back- a self-proclaimed garage band, modelled after the greats of the early 21st-century, whose garage wasn’t a garage at all, but the rat-infested basement of a megabuilding in Watson. It quickly became clear that playing a guitar in a BD was not the same as playing a guitar in real life; his chubby fingers moved clumsily over the neck of the thing, and the stares of the hot, disaffected twenty-something-year-olds looking at him felt like a physical weight on his shoulders. He’d made it thirty seconds before they called out, in bored voices, for the next auditionee to join.

That was the end of his rockerboy career. He still cranked up Cutthroat in his beat-up Archer Quartz, and he visited the Time Machine to browse through their Samurai section, but life moved on. He got a job working as a line cook at Buck-a-Slice, and he saved enough to move into his own apartment in Little China, despite Mama’s protestations that thirty-four was far too young an age to be leaving the nest, and that’s where he met Tanya.

Tanya, Tanya- it sounded beautiful, it sounded exotic, it sounded like something out of a fairytale. She didn’t work at Buck-a-Slice; no, she was far too good for that, far too beautiful. A scout for Jinguji would’ve whisked her away in a heartbeat- her tall, statuesque frame was meant to be draped in the finest of clothes, her fine blonde hair meant to be piled high in the most elegant of coiffeurs. She had just come to NC from the USSR, and it was blatantly clear that she had no idea what reputation Buck-a-Slice had from the second she walked in.

He'd stared at her with his jaw dropped open when she walked in. He was on cleaning duty that night; Dave was the one slavering away over the hot, spitting oil and sputtering stoves. Though they both had translators, Tanya had asked, in a thick Russian accent, if they had anything with _veegetibbles_ for sale. Jesse had been so gobsmacked by her presence that he hadn’t said anything, still staring at her with his mouth hanging open, and something more miraculous than her mere presence in the shitty shop he’d been working at for a year already happened: she laughed, so sweetly he thought he’d died and gone to heaven.

He blamed it on his dazed state of mind that he blurted out a clumsy proposition to take her on a date; if he’d been properly sober and focused, with the hyperawareness that had perpetually made his shoulders slump inwards, as though trying to free up some of the space he occupied, he would’ve never said anything more to her than a list of their specials that evening.

But the fact of the matter was that he hadn’t been aware of himself, and he’d asked her out, and _she said yes._

Things snowballed fairly quickly after that. One date became another, and then another. He introduced her to Mama, who immediately disliked her and said that she nothing more than a USSR gold-digger, to which Jesse had lost it and asked what gold she could’ve possibly been digging for in the shithole of his apartment, in the shithole that was his entire life. He’d never spoken a word back to Mama before; they stared at each other in mutual shock and horror, before he got up from the table and told Tanya that they were leaving, right that minute.

Whenever he asked her why she was still with him, she’d laugh that same sweet, bell-like laugh that had made him fall immediately in love with her in the first place, and she’d say, “Where else would I _pussibly_ want to go, Yesse?”

She moved in not long after the incident with Mama, and for a time, he was happier than he’d ever been in his entire life. She was four years younger than him but acted a good ten years younger than her age, most of the time; she was needy, and clingy, and he was thrilled at the notion that someone needed him, that someone wanted to cling to him.

And then things, as they inevitably do, went to shit.

As he worked at Buck-a-Slice, and cleaned tabletops, and dealt with the drunks that walked in at two AM, she would sit in the apartment bored out of her mind, watching television ads with hooded eyes as she lolled on the couch. She wasn’t friends with any of their neighbors; she was too good for them, far too good for them, and everyone knew it perfectly well. And so she watched TV, and she pinged her mother in the old country on the holo, and she waxed her legs even though her hair was so light it looked as though nothing was there at all, and she watched some more TV, and waited for Jesse to save her from the utter monotony of it all.

Days turned into weeks like that, and weeks turned into months. When he tried to kiss her awake in the morning, she’d cover her face with a pillow. The hour-long conversations they’d have after Jesse came back from work- she’d always tell him that he was the first man she ever met who had something interesting to say- dwindled into five minutes of painful small talk before they went to bed for the night, clinging to their respective sides of the bed like lifelines. They never had sex anymore.

And then.

It had been a slow day at work, the kind where Jesse would check the clock once and then steadfastly keep his eyes on the floors he was mopping for an hour, and turn his gaze back to the clock only to come to the realization that it had been three minutes since he’d last checked the time. He’d nearly missed his stop on the NCART, he was so tired. The exhaustion seemed to go beyond the physical; he felt drained, in all senses of the word. Never Fade Away had come on the radio the night before, and he hadn’t sung a single word alongside Johnny and Kerry, _that’s_ how bad it got.

He wasn’t expecting Tanya to be waiting up for him, her eyes sparkling in a way they hadn’t for months. She was gripping her tablet tightly in her hands; wordlessly, she handed it over to Jesse, who stared at the screen bewilderedly. On it was an ad for something called _Mr. Stud, XCV/19 series._

“This is what we need, Yesse,” Tanya had said, rubbing her hands over his sore biceps in a way that had him at half-mast. “This is what we need to- to how you say- to _shake things up._ Don’t you think so?”

And she had blinked her kittenish blue eyes at him, and her elegant fingers were working out a painful knot in his neck, and he’d been lost to the world. He would’ve agreed to bomb Arasaka Tower once more in that instance; he would’ve done whatever she asked of him. Getting a dick implant seemed simple enough.

Until it wasn’t.

The fucking ripperdoc had been shady from the start. Jesse had walked past the shop three times before he’d finally found it; it was a hole-in-the-wall, barely big enough to hold all the ripperdoc’s necessary equipment.

He’d _hoped_ it had all the necessary equipment, anyway.

The operation seemed to go smoothly; he felt his dick, longer and stronger than ever, between his legs and at the ripperdoc’s behest, gave it a hesitant tug. It stood at full attention, proud as a marine, and Jesse had laughed with glee, forking over the nine thousand the ripperdoc’s behest without question. The seven-inch monster in his pants was going to save his relationship; it was going to redeem him of having kept the most beautiful girl in the world trapped in a Watson shithole. He’d ducked into the bathroom of a Captain Caliente to snap a quick pic and send it to Tanya, who had responded with about a dozen and a half heart eyes.

That night, she’d moaned more loudly than she ever had before, and Jesse felt his heart swell alongside his dick. Their pillow talk lasted for a whopping three hours afterwards, but neither of them had wanted to go back to sleep; the unexpected amorousness that had fueled their relationship had returned with a vengeance. For the first time in a long time, they were both happy. His boss, noticing the effort he’d begun to put into his work now that he had something to invigorate him (both the thought of Tanya waiting for him back home, and the secret knowledge of the seven-inch behemoth he had in his pants that Dave could only _dream_ of) promoted him to co-manager, and he was making enough money to buy Tanya the nice clothes she’d look at wistfully whenever they passed by Jinguji, little things for the apartment she’d always wanted, but that they could never afford. Not in excess- he wasn’t making a lot of ‘ennies working at Buck-a-Slice, whether it was as a line cook or a co-manager-, but enough so Tanya would be happy.

And what made her happiest was Mr. Stud.

If you told High School Jesse- pimply, dorky, two-hundred-and-twenty-pound High School Jesse- that he would be having the wildest sex he could imagine with the most beautiful woman in the world every night in a matter of a decade and a half, he would’ve never believed you. But he was; he, Jesse, failed rockerboy, disappointment of a son, Buck-a-Slice worker at thirty-five, was making a woman very happy with what was in his pants- and, more important, what was in his heart.

But good things could not last forever. And it right after particularly frenzied session with Tanya that the universe revealed this to him in its entirety.

They were still panting from exertion, staining the upholstery of the car seats with their mingled sweat and bodily fluids, but Tanya had managed to recover enough to wriggle her way into Jesse’s arms, tucking her blonde head beneath his chin and snuggling up on his chest with a happy purr. Jesse laid back, staring at the roof of his car with a huge smile spreading across his face. Tanya had surprised him by picking him up from work, and he was so elated to see her- to see _Dave_ seeing her kissing him, a dumbstruck look on his idiotic face as they walked out the door, hand-in-hand-, they’d barely managed to park the car somewhere discrete before they were flinging themselves onto each other.

Jesse had lifted a hand to stroke through Tanya’s blonde locks, and that’s when she began to scream ripping herself out of his arms and flinging herself to the other side of the car.

Jolting entirely out of his post-sex reverie, Jesse had opened his mouth to ask her what the matter was. Instead, what came out was a scream so high-pitched, it rang in his ears for hours afterwards. The pain hit him like a freight train, sudden and swift; it was the most intense agony he’d ever been in, and it was coming directly from his penis, which was beginning to smoke.

“What’s happening?” Tanya demanded, eyes filling with confused tears. Jesse reached out for her, trying to comfort her, but another wave of pain washed over him, and he doubled over, clutching his crotch with hands that couldn’t fit entirely over it. He barely managed to grab his shirt and sunglasses before he was stumbling out of the car, leaving a wide-eyed Tanya staring after him.

“You forgot your pants, Yesse!” He heard her call out after him, but it might as well have been Sanskrit; he couldn’t understand a word, couldn’t understand anything past the pain that was consuming him whole.

And then, as he was stumbling out of an alleyway, he saw the girl.

She had merc written all over her, but he would’ve begged for help from the most haughty of corpo agents in that moment; would’ve begged for help from anyone who could give it to him. He stammered out his predicament, and through it all he must’ve said something coherent, because she agreed to help him, however reluctantly. The words “all right” had never sounded more sweeter; no human being had ever seemed sweeter. Even as she lectured him about using black-market dick tech, he thought, in his delusional state, that nobody had ever been more beautiful- not even Tanya, who was probably still reeling from the sight of her boyfriend’s cock nearly exploding.

He'd jumped out of the girl’s car like his dick was on fire as soon as they got to the ripper- and it was; the smoke turned into fire the second he hopped onto the operation table. The ripper had to extinguish the flames before she got to work, but she did the skin grafts for his thighs free of charge, since, as she said, he was the poorest-looking bastard she’d ever laid eyes on.

Tanya blew up his phone about ten times during the procedure, frantic with worry. When he finally limped out of the clinic and pinged her holo, her porcelain face was flushed with tears, and she’d never looked more beautiful.

“I thought you were _dead,”_ she sobbed, and he murmured comforting, nonsensical things for thirty minutes before she finally allowed him to end the call, promising to see her home shortly.

Instead of going straight home, though, he sat on the curb of the parking lot, staring at his palms like he’d never seen them before. His dick had been halved- more than halved. It was smaller than his original size was, which was already pretty small to begin with, and his thighs were still immensely tender from the flames. And Tanya- dear, sweet, lovable Tanya- was going to leave him. If not now, eventually. It was foolish to have thought this could go on forever. His dick may have been huge, but his soul had shrunk. He was spending the best years of his life co-managing Buck-a-Slice, for God’s sake. He never became the rockerboy he wanted to be. And soon enough, Tanya was going to realize that Mr. Stud had only been a temporary fix- that you could slather fresh paint over a decaying wall, but it didn’t stop the asbestos from creeping into the room.

In that moment, he wished, more than anything, that he had a father. He had no male friends- Dave was _not_ a friend-, nobody to turn to in situations like these, except a cold, uncaring Net that would’ve more likely than not laughed their asses off at him in the comment section of his advice forum.

But his father, he was sure, would’ve comforted him. He would’ve given him mind-blowing advice that would turn the situation on its head entirely. He would’ve told him that it was okay to have a two-inch dick, that most men had two-inch dicks, in fact, and the ones that said they didn’t were lying.

He didn’t have a father, though. Not one he’d ever met, anyway. So instead, he called Mama and waited, painstakingly, for her to pick up.

She did, after the third ring.

“Jesse?” She asked, looking both relieved and wary at the same time. He hadn’t spoken to her in months, not since she had been so rude to Tanya during their first meeting, and the sound of her voice caused his eyes to well up with tears.

“Mama,” he began- and then stopped. What was he going to tell her? That he implemented a seven-inch dick for his girlfriend so she wouldn’t leave him? That the dick in question had betrayed him, set him on fire? That his girlfriend was probably going to leave him regardless of whether his dick was seven inches or two inches or nonexistent, because more and more she’d been hinting that she wanted to start a family, to use that cock of his for something more than five orgasms a night, each, and that he couldn’t give her what she wanted when he barely knew how to take care of himself, let alone someone else?

“Mama,” he repeated, trying to keep my voice steady. “Who was my dad?”

Utter silence on her end for half a minute. And then a sigh.

“I knew this day would come,” she said. She suddenly looked so tired, so haggard, that Jesse immediately hated himself for asking, and yet he had to ask; it was the question that had constantly evaded him throughout his childhood, and for most of his adult life. If there was any time he would ask, it would be now, after his dick malfunctioned and his life followed suit. “I wanted to shield you from it, Jesús. You were better off not knowing. To know such a thing-“

She broke off with a shudder of revulsion. A mingle of trepidation and regret lanced up Jesse’s spine, and for a moment, he regretted asking in the first place. Because now- well, now he _had_ to know. There was no shielding himself from the truth this time.

“Who was it, Mama?” He asked quietly, and her eyes glazed over. She had to repeat herself three times before it finally registered.

“Johnny Silverhand,” she said. And then she burst into tears.

* * *

It went something like this:

Evana Garcia had been nineteen years old in the year 2023, and, like any self-respecting teenage girl at the time, utterly in love with Johnny Silverhand. She had begged and pleaded and cajoled her parents into buying her a ticket to a Samurai gig- one of the last concerts they'd ever play, as a matter of fact. She'd never gone before; Papa had said that all those rock bands were depraved, more sinful than _El Diablo_ himself- and besides, he didn’t want her to overexert herself, didn’t she hear what the doctor had said about watching her health?

But she swore she'd come straight back home afterwards, that she wouldn't even say a word to anybody, that she’d call him or Mama the moment something felt wrong. Besides, she wasn’t doing it for the party scene, she said. She was in it for the music.

And she was- to a certain extent. The music was wild, exhilarating, _freeing._ It was therapy for the soul; to hear Johnny Silverhand's guitar shriek along Kerry Eurodyne felt holy, in a way. Like all the bad inside her- all the parts of her that wanted to take off her clothes in the middle of class, the parts of her that wanted to touch every single centuries-old painting and statue at the art museum with her oily hands, the parts of her that wanted to whisper something filthy to the cute, fluffy-haired waiter who remembered her order down to the drink the last time she went to Bleu with Mama and Papa- felt like they were expulsed out of her, and she'd emerge as clean and pure as a newborn baby. 

But it was Johnny Silverhand who somehow made her feel filthier than ever. It was written all over his face, in the way he stroked the neck of his guitar suggestively on those vids they would play over and over again on those alternative music channels she had to watch with the volume turned down low, in fear of alerting Papa to what she was doing. The act of watching him onstage felt dirtier than if she'd been caught with her hands down her pants, and _that_ was why she'd been so desperate to go. She needed to feel that feeling again in real time, needed to be sanctified and dirtied and sanctified all over again.

Samurai didn't disappoint.

There were hoards of people gathered at the front of the bar when she arrived. Most of them were middle-aged men wearing Samurai T-shirts and thin cotton headbands that had already been sweated through, but there were gaggles of teenage girls scattered around, most of them in low-cut tops and the shortest shorts Evanna had ever laid eyes on. Abruptly, she felt self-conscious in her jeans and t-shirt; she thought she was being cool in being low-key, but these girls made it plain there was nothing to be gained in being low-key. No, these girls were meticulously planning their seduction of the bouncer who stood way between them and the dressing room which held Johnny Silverhand, and if seduction didn't work, they were going to sneak in through the door on the side of the building. Only problem was, none of 'em had lockpicks.

"I have one," Evanna said shyly. One of the girls- the main one, Evanna supposed, with her curly blonde hair and her perfectly glossed red lips- looked up at her with an appreciative grin. There was nothing intimidating about Evanna; no competition to be found in her short, shaggy black hair or her skinny, gangly legs. 

“Thanks, babe,” the girl said, tossing her hair over her shoulder. “My name’s Liz, by the way.”

“Evanna,” Evanna murmured, entranced by the way the neon red lights of the bar sign caught in Liz’s golden curls.

“Why don’t you stick with us tonight?” Liz continued, watching Evanna with a knowing smile. “You’re not here with anyone, are you?”

Evanna caught herself before the excited, breathless “ _Really?”_ could make its way from her lips. Instead, she gave Liz a small smile and thanked her, to which she cooed at her and tousled her hair like an adorable puppy. Evanna didn’t mind; Liz was _cool._ Besides, it was obvious that, out of the gaggle of girls that followed her around like little ducklings, she was the one who actually had a shot to go through with her plan. She would somehow seduce the bouncer, and then she would seduce Johnny, and she’d tell them _everything_ afterwards, down to the face he made when he O’d.

A small thrill shot up Evanna’s spine at the thought, and she forced a smile when Liz gave her a quizzical look.

They didn’t end up using the hairpin in the end; one of the girls had managed to strike up a deal with the bouncer to let them in for five minutes before Samurai were shuttled off to their next gig, somewhere in Bombay. Liz didn’t ask how she’d managed to get the bouncer to concede to their demands, so neither did Evanna; the glossy, slightly swollen sheen of the girl’s lips was indicative enough of what had happened.

The doors to the bar opened a few minutes afterwards, and the swarm rushed in, filling up all four corners of space until there was barely room to move. Liz linked her fingers against Evanna’s, squeezing her hand when she felt how sweaty her palms were. Evanna squeezed back, feeling a rush of gratitude, but before she could say anything, the crowd was shrieking, and Samurai was onstage.

There they were, the figures on the posters that had donned Evanna’s walls for years- even as her furniture changed, as her bed was exchanged for a Trauma Team-grade cot that could monitor all bodily functions, as her bureau was shoved aside to make room for the cryogenic tube Papa had had to smuggle straight out of Canada to get. Those five figures were standing only a few feet away from her, and though their presences were mystical, like book characters come to life, it was Johnny- always Johnny- who her eyes were drawn to.

He was grinning lazily at the crowd, a joint burning bright orange where it hung loosely from his lips. His Samurai jacket was draped over his shoulders, leather jeans slung low on his hips, and Evanna thought she would asphyxiate at the sight of the strip of taut, tanned skin that showed when he rolled his shoulders slightly.

“He’s so gorge,” Liz sighed happily, swooning against Evanna’s shoulder. “God, don’t you want him to give you a tongue bath?”

“Yeah,” Evanna murmured, though she barely registered the words. She wanted him to do whatever he wanted to her- she wanted him, full stop. He ruined her for all other men, and he hadn’t even spoken two words to her, hadn’t even so much as looked in their direction.

They kicked things off A Like Supreme, which got the crowd even more fired up than they already were; Evanna thought that she’d go deaf from the roar that erupted from the crowd, the singing and shrieking in tandem as Johnny moved around onstage. Evanna drank in the sight of his fingers flying down the strings of his guitar, longer and thicker than hers- and yet somehow more graceful than hers had ever been, expertly pulling sounds from the axe that matched Kerry’s wailing vocals. Adrenaline rushed hot in her veins as Liz’s body pressed against hers, shrieking the lyrics to every song they played from Chippin’ In- even the ones some of the crowd didn’t know as well, like Metal Grave or My Marionette. Past the sunglasses, Johnny’s eyes seemed to flit their way, and Evanna clutched Liz’s hand tight enough to hurt.

The gig was only an hour long, but it felt more like a century had passed by the time Samurai closed off with Never Fade Away. This one, at least, everyone knew- Evanna screamed the chorus hoarse as Liz’s friends jostled her on all sides, feeling more alive than she had in the past fifteen or so years.

And then they- Johnny- were clambering offstage, out of sight, and Evanna felt a desperate, absurd urge to follow. But just as she took a step forward, Liz tugged at her hand.

“C’mon, choom!” She whispered, eyes glittering. “We can go backstage now! Quickly!”

Evanna let Liz pull her forward, past the crowd still dazed by the last hour- not that she could very well blame them-, and down the stairwell, where the basement had been commandeered as the band’s “dressing room.” Some of the girls had already gotten there; two of them were deep in conversation with Henry and Denny, while three more had gathered around Kerry while he looked on with a mixture of confusion and acceptance.

In the center of it all, Johnny Silverhand sat on a faded leather couch, two joytoys on either lap, and a fresh joint held between his teeth. Evanna froze at the sight- and at the fact that she was so close to him, she could see the small smudge of dirt on the concave of his cheekbone she automatically wanted to wipe clean for him-, but before she could make her retreat back upstairs, Liz was making her way over, dragging Evanna in her wake.

“Hi,” she purred, leaning forward a little so that her cleavage was more defined in the dim lighting of the basement. “Mind if I steal that?”

Without waiting for an answer, she plucked the cigarette from his lips and put it between her own. Evanna stared at her with poorly disguised jealousy; she wished, more than anything, that she was brave enough to pull a move like that.

The joygirls seemed shocked by Liz’s moxie, too; wordlessly, they removed themselves from Johnny’s thighs and headed straight for Nancy, who was beckoning them over with a sly grin on her narrow face. Johnny watched them go with a tiny, barely-there sigh, before turning his attention wholly on Liz.

“You sure you’re old enough to smoke?” Johnny asked, tilting his head upwards. Whether it was intentional or unintentional- Evanna was leaning towards the former; every move Johnny made seemed calculated-, it served to accentuate the sharp line of his jaw. Evanna felt the same crazy urge to lick his face clean stronger than ever; she had to grit her teeth so she could ground herself, not do anything rash.

“Old enough to do a lot of things,” Liz said, in that same confident purr, before she draped herself over a thigh that one of the joytoys had only just occupied. “You wanna know what kind?”

Evanna tried not to zone out; she was genuinely curious what Johnny’s response to this would be. But then he was taking off his sunglasses, and his eyes deliberately found hers. She couldn’t help but shudder.

“You gonna take a seat?” He asked her, wryly amused. Evanna’s heart nearly stopped when he deliberately looked down at his empty thigh, and then back at her; it was like one of her numerous wet dreams had come to life, and yet this was wilder than any dream she could’ve thought up with on her own.

“Sure,” she heard herself saying. And then, very deliberately, she took a seat on the dirty floor of the basement. Johnny’s eyes flashed with something, and she knew, then, that she had made the right choice. She became interesting in a matter of seconds.

“Is that T-shirt from a band I know?” He asked, scrutinizing her tee, and a full-body flush crept over her when she realized that _Johnny fucking Silverhand_ was staring at her boobs, non-existent though they were.

“I’d hope so,” she said, trying very hard to be casual. Liz was pouting from her perch on Johnny’s thigh; though his arm was loosely clasped around her waist, his concentration was focused entirely on Evanna. The knowledge felt like something electric inside her. “It’s Pink Floyd. My dad’s.”

“A fan of the oldies, huh?” Johnny murmured, gaze flitting back up to her face. “You’ve got good taste.”

What happened next was to be expected. Henry juggled two platters of cocktails he’d managed to scrounge up from upstairs, and Liz encouraged Evanna to drink up- a little too enthusiastically. Still, Evanna had drunk, and so had everyone else in the room, even though they were supposed to be on the bus to Bombay by then and their manager was waving his arms in the air by the stairs, screaming that they had five minutes to get their shit together before he stranded them.

By that point, Evanna had shifted beside Johnny on the couch. Their thighs were touching, and the heat radiating from his felt as forceful as a small sun. Liz had grown bold enough to nibble at his earlobe and the underside of his jaw, but his attention was still placed on Evanna, like she was the only one in the room. The only one worth speaking to, anyway.

Drunk off his gaze, she rambled about the bands she liked- the oldies, like the Velvet Underground and the Talking Heads, the Pixies and Radiohead, The Clash and- well, he got the picture-, about how her parents despised all the things she liked, so it made sense that they threw a fit whenever she played her records or her favorite radio station in their presence, about how Papa in particular would’ve had a hernia if he knew she’d gone to the concert without taking her meds beforehand-

“You’re sick?” Johnny interrupted, for the first time in minutes. She flushed; she hadn’t meant to say that out loud.

“It’s terminal,” she told him. “Heart implant failure from when I was a baby- I was nine weeks premature, and my organic heart came out dysfunctional. If they take it out, even to replace it, I’ll die immediately.”

He didn’t say anything, but she could tell his gaze had sharpened.

Emboldened, she added, “They brought a cryogenic storage unit for me, just in case I get worse. They think they can fix my heart implant in the future, once technology develops further.”

“So you’re gonna wake up in the future fifty years from now with a new heart, huh?” Johnny mused, a strange look gleaming in his dark eyes. “Lotta people would kill to be in your shoes.”

“Like you?” Evanna asked, with a boldness that surprised both of them. Johnny’s lips quirked upwards.

“Nah,” he said quietly. “I’m good where I am.”

And then his gaze pointedly lowered from her eyes to her lips. Slowly, so she’d know what was coming, he leaned forward, jostling Liz’s perch on his thighs. Evanna sat ramrod straight as his breath fanned over her lips, and then, in the next second, they were kissing. Johnny Silverhand was the first boy- man- she’d ever kissed in her life, and the thought made her heart grow wings. It nearly exploded when he suddenly stood up, unceremoniously pushing Liz to the side, and offered Evanna a hand.

“Do you wanna-?” He jerked his head over to a small, barely perceivable utility closet.

She said yes, of course. And even when she didn’t have a condom, and it turned out that she didn’t either, she let him finish in her, anyway. That was her consummation as a true fan- not just of Samurai, of rock as a whole, but of _music._ She was being sullied only to be purified later, after all.

Liz was probably seething on the other side of the door, but in the cramped, overheated dark of the utility closet, with Evanna’s legs clinging to Johnny’s hips and the taste of his sweat on her tongue, she found that she couldn’t care less.

And if only a few days later, her heart implant brought her a life-threatening implant that had her sealed into a cold black cryogenic tank for what would turn out to be the next thirty years, well- nobody would know of the antiquated pregnancy stick that nestled deep in the shoebox beneath her bed, or the fact that, as her body jerked convulsively and her life flashed before her eyes, her last thought was of the uncharacteristically sweet kiss that Johnny had bestowed upon her lips, just before he zipped his pants back up and wandered off to Bombay.

* * *

Mama gave Jesse the short version of what had happened.

There was a lot of new information to be unpacked and dwelled upon for the rest of his natural-born life- he’d never known that Mama had come from a rich family, let alone one that existed almost entirely decades before he’d been born into the world-, but his mind kept on rehashing the same thought over and over again, and he thought, deliriously, that this must’ve been what it was like to be a cyberpsycho, to feel like you were trapped in a body that wasn’t your own.

Johnny Silverhand, infamous rockerboy and domestic terrorist, the man who he’d looked up to since he could walk, was his father. He couldn’t tell whether he wanted to laugh or cry.

“You’re not lying to me, Mama, are you?” He asked in a hoarse voice, and she’d scoffed, the sound so familiar it instantly reassured him.

“You think I’d want to lie about a terrorist impregnating me? About waking up in a strange land years after my parents died, with all my belongings having been confiscated by the corp that bulldozed every house on the block to make room for a skyscraper? No, Jesús. It’s the truth. All of it.”

He believed her.

He wasn’t sure where he was supposed to go, or what he was supposed to do, when they finally ended the call about an hour later. Johnny had died in Arasaka Tower, never knowing what had happened- never knowing that he had a son growing in the uterus of a girl in the artificial utero of a cryogenic storage unit. When Mama had found out about Jesse after she’d been resuscitated, she had decided to keep him, to make a family for herself in the lonely world she’d woken up in. She never tried to contact the surviving members of Samurai, never asked for a share of Johnny’s property- most of which had been inherited by Kerry Eurodyne, anyway. She did not want her son to grow up with the knowledge that his father had been a terrorist; Samurai could keep their blood money.

And it wasn’t like anybody was going to believe Jesse if he told them, either. For starters, he and Johnny looked more like they came from different planets than members of the same species; Johnny was imposing and edgy and handsome enough to send girls into cardiac arrest when he looked their way, and Jesse- well, Jesse was distinctly not. And besides, the story that Mama told him was wild enough that the only reason why he believed her in the first place was that Mama had never lied to him, not once.

He didn’t think that reasoning would fly over well in a court of law, though.

He sat on the curb for another hour, staring at nothing, until the proprietor of the empty Thai place behind him shooed him off. He took the NCART back home, and when he finally arrived at the apartment, and Tanya had rushed to his side, hands fluttering all over him until he finally muttered that he was okay. And then he said something he hadn’t been planning on saying- not so soon after everything that had happened, anyway.

“I think we should take a break, Tanya,” he said in a rush, and her eyebrows furrowed.

“A break?” She repeated incredulously. What followed next was hours of screaming and crying and throwing things around the apartment, accusations that she had spent a year living in the same shithole with him, and this- this!- was what he had to tell her in response? Was this about Mr. Stud- didn’t he know he could’ve said no, that he didn’t have to do it, that how was she supposed to know it would set his genitals on fire? Did he think she couldn’t feel? Did he think she was stupid, just because she couldn’t articulate herself well to him? Did he know that her mother had begged for her to come back home months ago, said she found a nice Russian boy with a net worth well into the millions, and she said no, because she was in love with him, and she and Yesse were going to start a family together?

He said nothing, only looked at her sadly from the kitchen table as she paced, gripping her platinum hair in tight fistfuls as she bounced off the walls, throwing accusations both accurate and imagined his way.

“I’m not going to have kids with you, Tanya,” he said, when she finally quieted down enough for him to respond. “Or- or anyone, honestly.”

Tanya stopped pacing and stared at him, her eyes bloodshot from the force of her tears.

“ _What_? Why?”

He never thought he would make a good father before- knew that he wouldn’t, that he could barely keep a plant alive, let alone another human being. But now? Now that he could feel Johnny Silverhand’s blood in his veins, coursing through him always and forever? If you told him a week ago that Johnny was his father, he would’ve died from the sheer joy of it all, resurrecting himself back to life only to run to the nearest news station, to the nearest band auditions- to anyone who would listen to him.

That was not what he was going to do now, though. No, he was going to do the one thing Johnny Silverhand never could, and let go. He was not going to poison Tanya the same way Johnny had inadvertently poisoned his mother, poisoned her against the one thing in her life she had so loved. One of these days, he was going to be as impulsive and reckless as his father before him, and Tanya- beautiful, sweet, dear Tanya, who always deserved so much better than she got- was not going to deal with the aftermath.

“Because you deserve something better than to live in this shithole for the rest of your life,” He said honestly.

Tanya pleaded and cajoled and threatened him to stay, going so far as to toss his suitcase over the stairs, where it sailed far out of sight and landed with a dull _thunk_ several floors down, but that didn’t stop Jesse from bundling up his clothes into a small, misshapen bag he hadn’t used since high school and setting off for Mama’s apartment. He promised Tanya she didn’t have to leave the apartment, that he was going to pay six months’ rent and figure something out with her afterwards, but he didn’t think she could hear him over the screaming. Angry complaints from their next-door neighbors followed him as he walked down the hall to the elevator, and it occurred to him, for the first time, just how much the music he’d loved over the years sounded like the dull roar of furious neighbors, ricocheting off the walls. Samurai could’ve played in the heat of a domestic argument in any megabuilding in Heywood, and the music would’ve come out the same.

He stayed with Mama for a month and a half. Originally, he had been planning on scouting for another apartment as soon as he settled back into his childhood bedroom, staring up at the cracked ceiling, at the faded posters of Samurai plastered there that he tore down before the end of his first night there, but he and Mama had never been so at peace with one another. There was no lecturing, no screaming- largely due to the fact that he’d stopped listening to Samurai, to Tainted Overlord, to Cutthroat and Blood and Ice and every band he’d so loved and Mama had so loathed-, and, if Mama was feeling particularly generous, she would tell him a story about her childhood in the 2010s, eons away from his own.

He worked diligently at Buck-a-Slice; not even Dave screwing up half of the orders, yet again, could take away the concentration that had been bestowed upon him so suddenly. Tanya blew up his holo constantly, in the first few weeks following their break-up, and went so far as to come into work and scream at him in front of customers, but he steadfastly ignored her. Eventually, the calls and impromptu visits died down, until she never came around at all, and it was as though the past two years never happened.

He got a new dick and a new apartment- slightly better and roomier than the one he had left in Little China, though not by much- in that order, and his life seemed to settle into a routine he knew, instinctively, that his father would’ve hated. There was no music anymore, no girlfriend- the only person he could verifiably say he had a real conversation with was Mama, and even then it was only over the holo. But he was okay with it, mostly because to not be okay with it would've forced him to come to terms with the fact that he had willfully screwed up his own life, pushed away the only woman that would ever love him out of some misplaced sense of nobility. He was Jesse Garcia, and people like him were ubiquitous across Night City: disillusioned, dull-hearted, working ten hour workdays until he crawled back home to mindlessly watch TV ads... the only surprising part of it all was that it hadn't happened before. His delusions of grandeur faded with the first and only time he realized he was closer to it than he thought, and that, too, was okay. 

And then one day, out of the blue, the merc called.


End file.
